Overview and CQC Inspections

OverallGood

Our inspector's description of this service

Last updated 20 June 2017
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection checked whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

This comprehensive inspection took place on 18 April 2017 and was unannounced. The inspection team consisted of an inspector and one expert by experience. An expert-by-experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service. The expert by experience had experience in using care homes and community services for their relative.

Before our inspection, we reviewed information we held about the provider including, for example, statutory notifications that they had sent us. A statutory notification is information about important events which the provider is required to send us by law.

During the inspection we spoke with 14 people who used the service and two of their relatives. We spent some time observing care for five people living with dementia to help us understand their experience of the service. We spoke with four members of staff including two care staff, the deputy manager and the registered manager. We reviewed the care records of four people who used the service.

We also looked at other information related to the running of and the quality of the service. This included quality assurance audits, maintenance schedules, training information for care staff, staff duty rotas, meeting minutes and arrangements for managing complaints.

Inspection ratings

We rate most services according to how safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led they are, using four levels:

Outstanding – the service is performing exceptionally well.

Good – the service is performing well and meeting our expectations.

Requires improvement – the service isn't performing as well as it should and we have told the service how it must improve.

Inadequate – the service is performing badly and we've taken enforcement action against the provider of the service.

No rating/under appeal/rating suspended – there are some services which we can’t rate, while some might be under appeal from the provider. Suspended ratings are being reviewed by us and will be published soon.

Ticks and crosses

We don't rate every type of service. For services we haven't rated we use ticks and crosses to show whether we've asked them to take further action or taken enforcement action against them.

There's no need for the service to take further action. If this service has not had a CQC inspection since it registered with us, our judgement may be based on our assessment of declarations and evidence supplied by the service.

The service must make improvements.

At least one standard in this area was not being met when we inspected the service and we have taken enforcement action.